


Motivation or Competition

by CaptainErica



Series: Dares and Disasters [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Slow Burn, dares, series fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26302492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainErica/pseuds/CaptainErica
Summary: Where the dares began, why they had, why she couldn't say no... Well, there was a reason, silly as it might feel.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Series: Dares and Disasters [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1642420
Kudos: 12





	Motivation or Competition

Hermione’s ‘dare problem’ had really begun after the war.

While attending Hogwarts for her make-up year, she had found herself… bored. It was hard to explain and harder to quantify, but she had been unable to keep herself focused on the things she used to enjoy. Like studying, or classes.

They had started later, due to the need for rest, due to the lack of students… A lot of Muggle parents were understandably hesitant to allow their younger children to return. Some wanted more time with them before they allowed them back… It was a mess, especially because they had only an incomplete list of muggleborns and halfbloods to go through for new 1st years due to tampering at the ministry, but Professor McGonagall had taken it all in hand and reworked everything; you weren’t moving up a year, you were repeating a year. The 1st year class was bigger than the school had seen in years with all of the repeating students; and while the remaining years were annoyed to have to attend for another year than expected…

Well, some of them were really ready for the dull but predictable schedule of a school year to get their lives back on track.

While most of Hermione’s class wasn’t planning to return, and didn’t have to, she had chosen to return. No one expected any differently, and no one tried to talk her out of it after she had announced her intentions. The only exception to this, of course, was the ministry; trying to convince her into a position there ahead of her time. It was odd, she had thought, had said to Harry time and again as he told her about his plans to join the aurors. It was odd that they were asking a 19 year old for advice on how to change, advice on how to grow.

_“Shouldn’t they already be aware? Aren’t they aware of what we were doing? What can they gain from asking a teenager?”_

Harry had found it amusing, and had reminded her that she was the brightest witch of their age, of a few ages, of the _century_ (he was, if anything, even more dramatic now, but to see Harry smile was a treat). But what they wanted, he had said after relaxing more, feet up on the tiny coffee table they had both tried very hard to make _normal_ sized to no avail, was for _new_ ideas.

_“Think of it like… a test, yeah? We studied, we learned everything, we know what is right and what is wrong, but in the moment you look at the questions before you and suddenly it is all completely… gibberish. It means nothing. ‘What are the 12 uses of dragon’s blood?’ the first question says, and there you are thinking about that time you heard the TV in the sitting room say something over the summer about blood keeping the circulatory system running and that’s the only thing you can put down. It’s wrong, of course, but probably only because I’m certain that Snape never took a biology class.”_

He was right, in a weird way, and had a weird way of explaining it, but it had still rubbed her the wrong way. Every owl, every floo call, every press conference in the weeks leading up to November 1st: the first day.

She had spent Halloween with Harry and the Weasley family, a slightly more somber affair than it would have been at Hogwarts. She was at King’s Cross at just past 10am the next morning and then…

Then Hermione had gotten bored.

Classes were challenging. Head Girl duties added more work to the table, new things to figure out how to do and manage, including the Head Boy. But after a few weeks she had run through her timetable for studying. She had finished the course books for the year for the second time by then, and had finished the pre-set assignments.

It was, she knew, because she was working too hard and too long and too late. She barely slept, partly because of how focused she was on her work, but mostly because if she slept she could hear it, feel it, see it.

Most of it was, of course, because she already wasn’t sleeping, and she was back in Hogwarts where the final battle had happened. It didn’t help her to know this, though, so she continued to overwork herself until very suddenly she couldn’t convince herself to finish the readings she had scheduled in her planner. The study plan she had spent hours working on meant nothing to her, the words bled together into odd symbols and patterns that she didn’t care about any longer.

A month after that point and while her homework assignments were finished and handed in on time, that was only because she had completed them _before._ Her thoughts scattered, she turned to trying to read. The only problem was that textbooks did nothing for her, and her mind would wander, scatter, fragment into a million pieces.

Once gone her attention wandered around the room, picking up little pieces of conversation, little streaks of what people were saying to one another. It meant nothing.

So she had moved on to less academic books, and they helped for a while, and then it was winter break and she couldn’t stay in the castle. She couldn’t go back to her parents. Instead she went Grimmauld Place, and hid from the celebrations there.

She didn’t truly hide; she went to parties that her friends pulled her along to, cooked dinner with Harry in the dark kitchen that had only learned what ‘the muggle way’ meant after Harry had moved in properly just before Hermione had left for Hogwarts. It had been her idea, after all, to have everyone over the night of January 1st.

“I just think that it would be nice. They’ll all have prior commitments for New Year’s Eve. If I could have I’d have spent it with my parents.” She said over breakfast on the 27th. Harry looked at her a moment before shrugging,

“I have the 2nd off, are you going to make me cook or anything?”

Hermione shrugged, then smiled after a moment of thought. “Yeah, think you can help me out in the kitchen?”

On the morning of the 2nd, Harry and Hermione laid out all of the things they needed to make. It seemed like it would go well; they were on the same page about the canapes and the dips, and Harry had some great ideas for other little finger foods that Hermione was excited to try and make. But… Hermione’s attention to detail was no match for the tornado that was Harry Potter in the kitchen. He was a force, and as things that needed to be cooked early were set into motion, and things that they could prep for were slowly chipped away at, Hermione realized she was in over her head.

Or, more, she found herself in the same patterns as she had while at school just weeks before: starting, stopping, changing projects. She was all over the place, no order, no direction despite the clearly laid out list that she and Harry had managed to get through the day before simply because he had been doing it with her. She frowned at that thought, wondering if she would forever need a partner to be able to get things done, hands deep in a bowl of cookie dough she had started kneading by hand for reasons even she couldn’t remember.

She was rolling it up to chill in the fridge when Harry looked up at her from his side of the long table in the kitchen, grinning. “Good, now you’re done with that… bet you can’t finish the canape prep before I’m done with these.” He said while he lifted his chopping block to show her.

Hermione felt her brain flip into gear at the taunt, the _dare._ “Oh, you’re _on._ ” She had said.

Back at Hogwarts, Hermione had found it very easy to entice her friends and acquaintances into daring her into doing things. It got to the point where they would do it themselves, if only because it would get her off of hounding them to do _their_ work. She did find her own motivation again; deep and hidden as it had gotten for so many months.

She had dusted it off and continued on, working hard after school ended and she was hired on at the Ministry. But the dares didn’t go away, and she couldn’t say no to them, she couldn’t get away from them. She had spent so long encouraging them at school that her friends just kind of did it as they continued with their lives. It really wouldn’t be a problem if she could say no to them.

Actually, it wouldn’t really be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that Malfoy had realized that she couldn’t say no to a dare. He had to have realized it, had to know the weight his drawled words held.

It wouldn’t be a problem if Malfoy weren’t so eerily capable of hitting all of her buttons. If he weren’t so…

Well, there were no words to describe Malfoy, were there? None that could fully encompass how absolutely annoyed she was just now, none that could explain how her mind was going in circles because of him… He was some type of horrible enigma for her, and oh how she hated that. She hated it so very much and it was likely because she couldn’t figure out why she _cared_ to figure him out.

“Granger, help me understand how this helps.” The bane of her entire existence said. Malfoy rarely _asked_ things of her, which was obnoxious in and of itself. He was holding, she knew, the _Prophet_ and had likely been reading the 2nd or 3rd page.

“No.” was how she answered, though again it wasn’t a question, barely a request, probably a demand.

Malfoy, though she hadn’t looked up from the checker board, gave her a look that showed how annoying he found her at that moment. Or maybe it was how exasperated he felt in the face of… _her._ “Well, you can tell me when you’re done, then.” He muttered, leaning heavily back against the desk she had forgone in order to use the floor as her work area.

Hermione ignored him, moving the pieces around the board. In truth the whole exercise was pointless; she already knew how many legal checker game moves it would take to get the precise configuration he wanted in the shortest amount of time (it had been the first one she had tried), but she had slipped into memories with how calming and distracting the repetitive movements were. She wouldn’t tell him that, though, he could figure it out on his own if he felt like it. She just… really didn’t want to talk about the news. She didn’t want to talk about it with _him_ and she didn’t want to

“8 moves.” Hermione said, sitting back after another successful finish. “That’s the shortest, and while I cannot fathom why you needed to know this when you came in here, I wonder at your lack of attention span if you’re unable to figure it out yourself.”

Malfoy shifts and stands, fidgety, forgetting about the paper for a moment simply because he can’t ever back down from even the softest of insults. “I’m not the one sitting on the floor.” His voice was grating almost, something you wouldn’t expect when someone said he _drawled_ , but then he knew precisely which nerves of hers to rub against to get the worst from her.

It was tiring, truthfully. She looked at him, unworried by his assessment. “I still won’t talk about the _Prophet._ You know they print mostly fabricated stories _still._ ” She says, and this is a particular annoyance for her, had been for a while and that much is clear on her face and in her voice.

Malfoy, miraculously, accepted this without further pushing. Not for the first time in the past few months, Hermione found herself wondering at how Malfoy was acting with her, around her. It was a dangerous thing to allow herself to wonder with him standing just there, practically lording over her as she sat on the floor of her small ministry office.

The fact that they were both fitting into the office at this moment was a small miracle brought about by an offhand dare from Harry a week or two before; he hadn’t believed she could tidy the cluttered office she practically lived in. “I bet you can’t get this place clean and organized.” He had said, in a tone that really showed how much he believed that statement. So, of course, she’d done it. All the loose parchment notes she had were bound into organized journals of notes, and the stacks of signed documents she had to keep for records were filed into the rows upon rows of filing drawers that had always been built into the walls of her office but that she had never tried to use because she had inherited the space from an entirely disorganized wizard who had lost his _comfortable_ post at the ministry in the wake of the fall of Voldemort. The Auror department had cleared the office as not containing any terrible curses, and had not cleaned it out themselves, so…

So there she sat on the floor of her immaculate office with Draco Malfoy looking down at her, as he does, did, forever found himself doing. It wasn’t terribly unpleasant, which was why Hermione stood and waved her wand to pack up the checker board and leave it bumping gently into Malfoy’s shoulder as she made her way back to her chair.

“Will that be all, Malfoy? I really do have a job to do, you know. All of this distraction is, as you can imagine, terrible for my focus.” It came out perfectly politely, something Malfoy hated rather deeply.

His mouth turned down into the tiniest of frowns, his cold blue eyes, so light that sometimes she wondered if they really _were_ the grey some people called them, were trained on her with a hint of curiosity that she pretended wasn’t there. “Until next time, then, Granger.” He said after a moment, voice a little softer. She refused to think that it sounded _thoughtful_ or even _nice._

It was almost like a thinly veiled threat, right? Him promising to see her again? So why was she so very excited by the prospect, like she had been every time he had said something similar in the past few months?

This was intolerable, truly, she couldn’t continue like this or she would get no work done. She would, she thought as her office door shut lightly behind him, simply stop accepting his baiting and his dares. She was an adult, after all, she could contain herself around him. She could say no to a dare.


End file.
